FREEDOM FRIED

Simi Valley, Calif.

In Naomi Klein’s brilliant analysis of the Iraqi elections in her February 28 “Lookout” column, she writes, “If it weren’t for the invasion, Iraqis would not even have the freedom to vote…and then to have that vote completely ignored.” Bush did promise to export American-style “democracy” to Iraq, didn’t he? The “freedom” to have one’s vote ignored is fast becoming a hot trend in America.

PAMELA SIRKIN

PREMATURE WITHDRAWAL?

Greenburgh, NY

I read with interest David Corn’s “Democrats & Withdrawal” [Feb. 28], highlighting the need for the Democrats to come up with an Iraq exit policy. My suggestion: Democrats should press for an Iraqi national referendum. Let the people decide if we should stay or go. If the Iraqi people want us to leave, President Bush and Congress should immediately withdraw our troops. Iraq is not a colony. We must prove to the world that Iraq is an independent nation, and we are not occupiers.

PAUL FEINER

BIGOT-TOONS

Champaign, Ill.

Richard Goldstein remarks in “Cartoon Wars” [Feb. 21] that “there’s a long history of bigotry in editorial cartoons.” If we go back far enough into the nineteenth century, we do find some pretty vicious racial and ethnic stereotypes in editorial cartoons. Much of that disappeared fifty years ago, but Goldstein implies that it continues apace today. Mostly it doesn’t. Goldstein is pretty clearly a visual illiterate when it comes to cartoons. He remembers that “during the 1996 campaign, Bob Dole was often drawn with a withered arm, or shown as a patient on an operating table.” The depiction of Dole on an operating table (assuming this picture ever appeared) probably had more to do with his age, which was often the subject of editoon ridicule. But I doubt any full-time editoonist ever portrayed Dole with a withered arm. I know quite a few editorial cartoonists, and none can recall seeing such a cartoon. Can Goldstein produce a copy of even one? Given that he thinks cartoons are from the realm of childhood fantasy and that giving GeeDubya a tiny nose and large ears makes him appear “infantile” rather than chimplike, I pretty strenuously question whether he can accurately decipher any cartoon.

R.C. HARVEY

Normal, Ill.

Richard Goldstein writes that Postcards From Buster and SpongeBob inflame conservative tempers, and that right-wingers “aren’t really worried about cartoons turning kids queer. Their aim is to see that homophobia is free to operate, and…to keep children from seeing gays as part of the human community.”

Children’s media generally reinforce heterosexual, white, middle-class norms. Centrist shows and books treat those norms as apolitical and urge adults to think of the child as apolitical (“innocent”) too. So when a cartoon points out that adults and children inhabit the same volatile time and space, and supposedly believe in fairness for all, conservatives bristle. Their hypocrisies have been exposed in what seems like the simplest of forms. “Fundamentalists are convinced that pop culture is stealing the souls of their children,” Goldstein writes, but what is at stake is children’s social conscience. If adults (sentimentally or strategically) withhold information about the world, kids grow up embracing reactionary, unreflective thinking about events. Meanwhile, if adults convince themselves that children don’t share their ugly reality, they can do cheerful lip service to the Golden Rule and rationalize destructive policies.

Oh, Nation. No, no, no, no, no. The crucified SpongeBob on the cover–you just shouldn’t have done it. No matter how much dishonor the Revs. Falwell and Wildmon and Father Geoghan and Archbishop Gibson and the Venerable George W. Bush have brought upon Christianity, Jesus still deserves our respect. Besides, no representation of torture should be treated as a joke. (For the record, I’m a Buddhist. And, yes, if you’d run a picture of Miss Piggy as Kuan Yin, I would have complained.)

ANNE SHARP

GOLDSTEIN REPLIES

New York City

I haven’t found any sketches of Bob Dole with a withered arm, so they may well not exist, as R.C. Harvey asserts. But cartoonist Michael Ramirez did draw Dole with sticklike, skeletal legs (under the legend “Dead Man Walking”); Sean Delonas rendered him holding a cane, with a seeing-eye dog at his side; and Matt Davies put Dole’s name over an unattended walker. The idea that images like these were a comment on Dole’s advanced age seems disingenuous, since Ronald Reagan was never shown with such morbid features. This was a mocking response to Dole’s disability–a source of much anxiety at the time–done with enough subtlety to provide the artists with deniability. The lesson here is that bigotry in cartoons has grown more indirect, at least when it comes to race. But it’s still permissible to traffic in other stereotypes, as the many images of Hillary Clinton riding a broomstick demonstrate.

RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

EUROPE’S ANTI-SEMITISM

Ann Arbor, Mich.

Tony Judt’s “Goodbye to All That?” [Jan. 3], about modern anti-Semitism in Europe, rightly condemns the Zionist claim that “there is no distinction between the Jewish people and the Jewish state.” Jews who publicly speak out against the Israeli occupation often find themselves shunned by the Jewish community. How ironic it is that those who have vowed “never again” to allow silence in the face of atrocities have yet to raise their voices on behalf of the besieged Palestinians.

LAUREL E. FEDERBUSHJewish Witnesses for Peace

San Francisco

Tony Judt competently reiterates the obvious facts that not all anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism and that the leading cause of Jew-hating in Europe today is Israel’s brutal suppression of the Palestinians. Curiously, however, he makes no attempt to explain the Europeans’ peculiar emphasis on Israeli wrongdoing. The Russians (to give one example) have committed crimes in Chechnya comparable to those of the Israelis in occupied Palestine, but they are not vilified the way Israelis are. Nobody compares modern Russia to Nazi Germany or suggests banning Russian academics from conferences.

Putting the liberation of Palestine at the top of the humanitarian agenda may make sense for a host of practical reasons. But if those reasons are not articulated, the international community runs the risk of seeming to judge the Jewish state by different standards from those it uses elsewhere.

ALVIN ORLOFF

New Haven, Conn.

Citing public opinion surveys that show low and declining hostility to Jews on both sides of the Atlantic, Tony Judt denies that anti-Semitism is worse in Europe than in the United States. But this approach overlooks the well-documented resurgence of particularly intense anti-Semitism among Europe’s rapidly growing Muslim minority. In Europe, a substantial number of synagogues and Jewish schools have been burned, and many others are under police guard. Jews are subject to insults on the street and in schools. Moreover, anti-Semitic propaganda of the most violent kind is disseminated in Muslim religious institutions and by Arabic-language media. These developments have no parallel in the United States.

Judt further argues that Israel is responsible for the upsurge in anti-Semitism in Europe, on the grounds that European Muslims’ anger at Israeli policies explains the recent rise in expressions of anti-Semitism. But this is not an explanation. Many people around the world dislike particular foreign governments, but they do not invariably react with hatred and violence against ethnically similar people in their own country. Following Judt’s reasoning, we should expect to see an outbreak of anti-Arab hate propaganda and violence among African-Americans as they learn of the horrific atrocities being committed by the Arab government of Sudan against the black population of Darfur. Yet this is not happening. In other words, Judt ignores the elements of mobilization and institutionalization that have made possible a discourse of anti-Semitism among many European Muslims. Anti-Semitism on this scale does not simply come into being automatically. It has to be nurtured by particular institutions.

Finally, Judt overlooks the problems of social exclusion and unemployment among European Muslim communities. Given European Muslims’ well-known frustrations with their lives in Europe, it seems reasonable to ask, as Judt does not, whether Jews are being turned into scapegoats by unscrupulous people within the Muslim community. If so, the fault does not lie with Israel. Israel is not responsible for failures of social policy in Europe.

MATTHEW LIGHT

JUDT REPLIES

New York City

Alvin Orloff is right: There are indeed some in Europe who have seized the opportunity to criticize Israel with selective alacrity. But his conflation of the widespread condemnation of Israeli brutalities with a tiny minority of zealots who seek to ban Israeli scholars is mischievously misleading–the overwhelming majority of Israel’s European critics propose no such thing. And many of them are engaged in international organizations that are at least as active in publicizing other instances of rights abuse.

If Israel is a particular object of international attention, this is in part because its representatives insistently remind us that their country is the only democracy in the Middle East. This rather complacent self-image invites close attention to Israeli practices. Yes, Russia has done terrible things in Chechnya and there may be worse to come. Yes, the Sudanese government is committing genocidal atrocities in Darfur. But Sudan is not a democracy and nor, regrettably, is Russia. Democracies don’t break international law. Democracies don’t build walls across other people’s land. Democracies don’t use helicopter gunships to blow up residential districts. Democracies don’t impose collective punishments on families. And so on. If Israel insists that it is a fully paid-up member of the international club of advanced liberal democracies, it can hardly complain when it is held to more demanding standards of behavior than Sudan.

Matthew Light is correct to remind us of the growing anti-Semitism in Europe’s Muslim communities. And yes, there has been mobilization and exploitation of this sentiment in the Arab media. But whatever the very real failures of European social policy with regard to ethnic minorities, if Light really thinks that Arab and Muslim anger has nothing to do with Israeli policies and practices in the occupied territories, then I can only conclude that he inhabits a parallel universe: one in which a self-described Jewish state, whose leaders obsessively repeat their claim to speak and act for “all the Jews,” can do as it wishes without bearing any responsibility for the way people think about…Jews. The insouciant ease with which people like Light relieve Israel of any and all responsibility for the consequences of its actions only serves to confirm Laurel Federbush’s depressing and timely remarks.

“Anti-Semitism” today is a genuine problem. It is also an illusory problem. The distinction between the two is one of those contemporary issues that most divide Europe from the United States. The overwhelming majority of Europeans abhors recent attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions and takes them very seriously. But it is generally recognized in Europe that these attacks are the product of local circumstances and are closely tied to contemporary political developments in Europe and elsewhere. Thus the increase in anti-Jewish incidents in France or Belgium is correctly attributed to young people, frequently of Muslim or Arab background, the children or grandchildren of immigrants. This is a new and disconcerting social challenge and it is far from clear how it should be addressed, beyond the provision of increased police protection. But it is not, as they say, “your grandfather’s anti-Semitism.”

As seen from the United States, however, Europe–especially “old,” or Western, Europe–is in the grip of recidivism: reverting to type, as it were. Last February Rockwell Schnabel (the US ambassador to the European Union) spoke of anti-Semitism in Europe “getting to a point where it is as bad as it was in the 30s.” In May 2002 George Will wrote in the Washington Post that anti-Semitism among Europeans “has become the second–and final?–phase of the struggle for a ‘final solution to the Jewish Question.'” These are not isolated, hysterical instances: Among American elites as well as in the population at large, it is widely assumed that Europe, having learned nothing from its past, is once again awash in the old anti-Semitism.

The American view clearly reflects an exaggerated anxiety. The problem of anti-Semitism in Europe today is real, but it needs to be kept in proportion. According to the Stephen Roth Institute at Tel Aviv University, there were 517 anti-Semitic incidents in France in 2002 (503 in 2003) and fifty-one in Belgium (twenty-nine in 2003). These ranged from anti-Semitic graffiti on Jewish-owned shops to Molotov cocktails thrown into synagogues in Paris, Lyons and elsewhere.

Measured by everything from graffiti to violent assaults, anti-Semitism has indeed been on the increase in some European countries in recent years; but then it has in America as well. The American Anti-Defamation League reported sixty anti-Semitic incidents on US college campuses alone in 1999, 106 in 2002 and sixty-eight in 2003. The ADL recorded 1,559 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States in 2002 (1,557 in 2003), up from 906 in 1986. Even if anti-Semitic aggression in France, Belgium and elsewhere in Europe has been grievously underreported, there is no evidence to suggest that it is much more widespread in Europe than in the United States.

As for expressions of anti-Semitic opinion: Evidence from the European Union’s Eurobarometer surveys, the French polling service SOFRES and the ADL’s own surveys all point in the same direction. There is today in many European countries, as in the United States, a continuing tolerance for mild verbal anti-Semitism, as well as a continuing propensity to believe longstanding stereotypes about Jews: e.g., that they have a disproportionate influence in economic life. But the same polls confirm that young people all over Europe are much less tolerant of prejudice than their parents were. Among non-Muslim French youth, especially, anti-Semitic sentiment has steadily declined and is now negligible. A majority of young people questioned in France in January 2002 believed that we should speak more, not less, about the Holocaust; and nearly nine out of ten of them agreed that attacks on synagogues were “scandalous.” These figures are broadly comparable to results from similar surveys taken in the United States.

The one thing on which European and American commentators can agree is that there is a link between hostility to Jews and events in the Middle East. But they draw diametrically opposed conclusions as to the meaning of this link. It is increasingly clear to observers in France, for example, that assaults on Jews in working-class suburbs of big cities are typically driven by frustration and anger at the government of Israel. Jews and Jewish institutions are a convenient and vulnerable local surrogate. Moreover, the rhetorical armory of traditional European anti-Semitism–the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; Jews’ purported economic power and conspiratorial networks; even blood libels–has been pressed into service by the media in Damascus, Cairo and elsewhere. Thanks to satellite television, anti-Jewish images and myths can now spread with ease across the youthful Arab diaspora.

But whereas most Europeans believe that the problem originates in the Middle East and must therefore be addressed there, the ADL and many American commentators conclude rather that there is no longer any difference between being “against” Israel and “against” Jews: i.e., that in Europe anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have become synonymous. But that is palpably false. Some of the highest levels of pro-Palestinian sympathy in Europe today are recorded in Denmark, a country that also registers as one of the least anti-Semitic by the ADL’s own criteria–and the ADL has worked harder than anyone to propagate the image of rampant European anti-Semitism. Another country with a high level of support for the Arabs of Palestine is the Netherlands; yet according to the ADL the Dutch have the lowest anti-Semitic quotient in Europe, and 83 percent of Dutch citizens believe the government should take a role in combating anti-Semitism.

In other words, some of the most widespread pro-Palestinian and even anti-Zionist views are to be found in countries that have long been–and still are–decidedly philo-Semitic. And there is good evidence that Europeans have considerably more balanced views than Americans on the Israel-Palestine conflict in general. Thus, although Europeans are more likely to sympathize with the Palestinians than with Israel, they do so only by a ratio of 24:15, according to the ADL. Americans, by contrast, sympathize more with Israel than with the Palestinians, by a ratio of 55:18 (Gallup).

Europeans are also better placed to appreciate that old-style European anti-Semites were, and are, frequently quite sympathetic to Israel–and the worse Israel behaves, the fonder they become. Thus the French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, in an interview in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz in April 2002, expressed his “understanding” of Ariel Sharon’s harsh policies (“A war on terror is a brutal thing”), comparable in his opinion to France’s antiterrorist practices in Algeria forty years earlier, which he thought were no less justified.

The source of American anxiety and confusion is the unstinting support given by the United States to Israel ($3 billion per annum and uncritical backing for all its actions), and the ensuing sentiment among many Americans that since criticism of Israel is close to impermissible, anti-Zionist opinions must be anti-Semitic in origin. Indeed, the gap separating Europeans from Americans on the question of Israel and the Palestinians is one of the biggest impediments to transatlantic understanding today.

This gulf is well illustrated in a recent essay by Omer Bartov, a distinguished professor of European history at Brown University. In a lengthy discussion of contemporary anti-Semitism published last February in The New Republic, Bartov argued that just as the world failed to take Hitler at his word in the 1930s, so we are underestimating or even ignoring the revival, today, of similarly virulent anti-Semitism, whose consequences might prove comparably devastating. The message of the essay was that if anti-Zionism is a camouflage for anti-Semitism (and Bartov thinks it often is), then we should call it by its real name and combat it as such. In Europe especially it has become politically correct, Bartov suggests, to ignore–or play down–expressions of anti-Semitic opinion, particularly in the academic community. The time has come, he concludes, to call a spade a spade.

Bartov himself does not make the mistake of tarring any and all criticism of Israel with the brush of anti-Semitism. But by relentlessly drawing comparisons and analogies between contemporary anti-Zionism and the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the 1930s, he ends up conflating past and present. If we were wrong seventy years ago not to take Hitler’s exterminationist intentions seriously, he suggests, we are just as wrong to make any allowance for Hamas, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad (who said at a 2003 conference that “Jews rule this world by proxy”), renegade German politicians and novelists, misguided American academics, the former French ambassador to Britain (who several years ago referred to Israel as “that shitty little country”) and no doubt countless others.

In Bartov’s account, people might well have good reasons to criticize the policies of the Israeli government (Bartov himself is no admirer of Ariel Sharon). But those are not the reasons many of them express such criticisms. It is the hatred of Jews–Jews in Israel, Jews in Europe, Jews everywhere and always–that accounts for the virulence of the critique. The trouble with this account of the matter is, as I suggested above, that it does indeed make the relevant link between the Middle East and modern anti-Semitism, but inverts the causality.

It is the policies of Israeli governments, especially in the past two decades, that have provoked widespread anti-Jewish feelings in Europe and elsewhere. This may seem absurd, but there is a certain tragic logic to it. Zionists have always insisted that there is no distinction between the Jewish people and the Jewish state. The latter offers a right of citizenship to Jews anywhere in the world. Israel is not the state of all its citizens, much less all its residents; it is the state of (all) Jews. Its leaders purport to speak for Jews everywhere. They can hardly be surprised when their own behavior provokes a backlash against…Jews.

Thus Israel itself has made a significant contribution to the resurgence of the anti-Semitism Bartov and others describe. This is an outcome with which many Israeli politicians are far from unhappy: It retroactively justifies their own bad behavior and contributes, as they proudly assert, to a rise in the number of European Jews leaving for Israel. At a time when many Israelis are obsessed with the prospect of becoming a minority in their own enlarged territory, the inflow of Jews fleeing real or imagined persecution is an occasion for self-congratulation.

Bartov concedes a distinction between “soft-core” and “hard-core” anti-Semitism. However, he still insists that there is a single slippery slope leading from misguided academics and intellectuals to pathological murderers. Historically this may be true. But today the implications of such a conflation of different levels of criticism and prejudice are dangerously censorious. No doubt some of Israel’s strongest critics do display anti-Semitic propensities. But that doesn’t disqualify anti-Zionism as ipso facto anti-Semitic: As Arthur Koestler observed back in 1948, you can’t help people being right for the wrong reasons. If those of us who think Israel is behaving shamefully follow Bartov’s reasoning, we’ll be constrained to silence for fear of being accused of complicity in anti-Semitism ourselves.

What, then, is to be done? Those of us who take seriously the problem of anti-Semitism–but who utterly reject the suggestion that we ourselves are in danger of sympathizing with anti-Semitism under the guise of anti-Zionism–must begin by constructing and defending a firewall between the two. Israel does not speak for Jews; but Israel’s claim to speak for Jews everywhere is the chief reason that anti-Israel sentiments are transposed into Judeophobia. Jews and others must learn to shed inhibitions and criticize Israel’s policies and actions just as they would those of any other established state.

It may be easier for Jews to take their distance from Israel’s illegal acts and misguided calculations than it is for non-Jews–the latter are always vulnerable to moral blackmail by Zionists, especially in countries with anti-Semitic pasts. But we shall never be able to think straight about anti-Semitism until this firewall is in place. Once Germans, French and others can comfortably condemn Israel without an uneasy conscience, and can look their Muslim fellow citizens in the face, it will be possible to deal with the real problem. For indeed there is a problem. This is an arena in which legitimate responses shade all too readily into familiar prejudices.

Thus, to take one notorious example: Critics of the foreign policy of the Bush Administration who claim that it is directed in many cases by men with close ties to Israel are not mistaken. Contemporary US foreign policy is in certain respects mortgaged to Israel. Several very senior Bush appointees spent the 1990s advising politicians of the Israeli far right. But that does not mean that “Jewish interests” run the American government, as some European and many Arab commentators have inferred and suggested. To say that Israel and its lobbyists have an excessive and disastrous influence on the policies of the world’s superpower is a statement of fact. But to say that “the Jews” control America for their own ends is to espouse anti-Semitism.

Moreover, the slippage between criticism of America and dislike for Jews long antedates the founding of the state of Israel. “Anti-Americanism” and anti-Semitism have been closely interwoven at least since the 1920s, when European intellectuals looked with nervous distaste across the Atlantic and saw a rootless, predatory, commercial society, the incarnation of cosmopolitan modernity, threatening the continuity and distinctiveness of their own national cultures. Many critics of America, in Germany or France or Russia, were all too quick to identify the shifting, unfamiliar contours of an Americanizing world with the essential traits of a homeless Jewry. The link with Israel is new, but the image of “Jewish” America is an old story and a troubling one.

Or, to take an even more sensitive instance: The Shoah is frequently exploited in America and Israel to deflect and forbid any criticism of Israel. Indeed, the Holocaust of Europe’s Jews is nowadays exploited thrice over: It gives American Jews in particular a unique, retrospective “victim identity”; it allows Israel to trump any other nation’s sufferings (and justify its own excesses) with the claim that the Jewish catastrophe was unique and incomparable; and (in contradiction to the first two) it is adduced as an all-purpose metaphor for evil–anywhere, everywhere and always–and taught to schoolchildren all over America and Europe without any reference to context or cause.

This modern instrumentalization of the Holocaust for political advantage is ethically disreputable and politically imprudent. To deplore this abuse of other people’s sufferings seems to me an important civic duty. But to conclude that “the Jews” have made too much of what happened in Europe between 1933 and 1945, or that it is now time to move on–that edges us much closer to anti-Semitism.

This brings us to a related and equally sensitive issue. Among European intellectuals and artists–in Germany, for example–anti-Semitism occasionally surfaces in discussions of how to speak openly about the unmanaged past. Why, people ask, after all these years should we not speak of the burning of Germany’s cities, or the sinking of refugee boats, or even the uncomfortable fact that life in Hitler’s Germany–for Germans–was far from unpleasant, at least until the last years of World War II? Because of what Germany did to the Jews? But we’ve spoken of this for decades–the Federal Republic is one of the most philo-Semitic nations in the world; for how much longer must we (Germans) look over our shoulder? Will the Jews never just forgive us and let everyone move on? As this last question suggests, what begins as the search for historical honesty risks ending perilously close to resentment at “the Jews.”

In formerly Communist countries one frequently encounters resentment and perplexity, among well-informed and educated people, at the West’s failure to understand the enormity of the crimes of Communism. “Why won’t you compare Nazism to Communism?” they ask. There are a number of answers that one might offer, but the question is not unreasonable, especially when posed by Communism’s victims. And it must be addressed openly, lest the citizens of Eastern Europe tell themselves what a number of intellectuals in Romania, Hungary and elsewhere have already openly suggested: that the reason we in the West reject the comparison is that Nazism persecuted Jews above all, and it is Jews who set the international agenda for remorse, retribution and reparation. Once again, anti-Semitism emerges as the bastard child of otherwise reasonable political preoccupations.

There is no simple answer to the dilemmas raised by such issues. Somehow we need to juggle the need to speak honestly and openly about present politics and past sufferings without either imposing silences or legitimizing the resurrection of prejudices. In my view it is incumbent upon Jews in particular–Jewish writers, Jewish intellectuals, Jewish scholars–to address these contested and disconcerting problems. Because Jewish critics of Israel are less vulnerable to moral blackmail from Israel’s defenders, they should be in the forefront of public discussion of the Middle East, in America and Europe alike.

Similarly, Jewish commentators need to take the lead in opening up difficult and uncomfortable conversations about the past–and the present–in Europe. Public discussion in Germany especially, but elsewhere too, is often trapped between politically correct evasions and resentful “taboo-breaking.” The majority’s fear of offending Jewish sensibilities arouses a growing minority’s desire to do just that. We can never “normalize” the European history of anti-Semitism, nor should we. But if the charge of “anti-Semitism” remains suspended like Damocles’ sword across the European public space–as it is today across much of America–we shall all fall silent. And between controversial debate and fearful silence we would be well advised to choose the former. Silence is always a mistake.

YO, CANADA!

St. Mary’s, Kans.

While I agree with Richard Pollak’s “Patriot at the Bat” [Sept. 13], on Carlos Delgado’s tribulations from his protest against the playing of “God Bless America,” one point he neglected, and that has been ignored in other commentaries, is that Toronto is in Canada. Delgado draws his $18 million-plus salary from a Canadian company, patronized overwhelmingly by Canadian fans. This fact, which some of Delgado’s critics seem unaware of, makes the accusations of his being un-American somewhat beside the point. Canada has not been a member of the Coalition of the Willing, or the “Coalition of the Idiots,” as Carolyn Parrish, a Toronto-area Member of Parliament recently called it. Canadians have no troops in Iraq and reportedly are much more hostile to the United States since the start of the Iraq war. At a Montreal Canadiens game just after the invasion in March 2003, Montreal fans loudly booed the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” What is really surprising is that only one player among the several Canadian professional sports teams has taken a stand to protest this stupid war.

CHAS BAYLOR

THE REICH STUFF?

New York City

Jonathan Schell’s “Letter From Ground Zero” [Aug. 2/9] pinpointed for me the cause of my increasing sense over the past three years that I am living in 1930s Germany. The Bush regime’s blithe disregard or erasure of law resembles nothing more than Hitler’s, as described by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. The Nazis did not, she explained, dismantle existing law but merely disregarded it, creating parallel agencies to take over the functions of the old ones, using Nazi guidelines. The populace seemingly did not even notice. Here, people have noticed–at least some people–but we have been almost helpless to stop it. I dislike facile comparisons, and have been uneasy about my increasing feeling that we–Americans–are being taken over by a power hostile to what many of us regard as bedrock principle. Schell has clarified the situation for me. Thanks.

MARILYN FRENCH

SAID & SARTRE ON VIOLENCE

Santa Barbara, Calif.

While I welcome Tony Judt’s full-bodied and vigorous appreciation of Edward Said [“The Rootless Cosmopolitan,” July 19/26], it need not be bought at Sartre’s expense. Said’s stated and unstated position on violence “toward the ends of justice and in pursuit of realizing humanist values and democratic principles” was in spirit, if not letter, clearly closer to Camus’s than to Sartre’s. Nonetheless, Sartre’s advocacy of political and revolutionary violence was not ill-considered or without some hesitancy–however (in retrospect) wrong-headed and regrettable–as any fine-grained examination of his changing political views over the course of his adult life reveals. Furthermore, Said’s “firsthand experience of physical force” can hardly be valorized by way of contrast to Sartre’s experience. Both Sartre and de Beauvoir had firsthand experience of personal intimidation, death threats and physical violence, in particular in conjunction with their opposition to French colonialism in Algeria. Sartre’s flat at 42 Rue Bonaparte was bombed twice: on July 19, 1961, and January 7, 1962, most likely by the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète. Not without reason does Ronald Hayman’s 1987 biography of Sartre have a chapter titled “Kill Sartre.” And both Sartre and de Beauvoir participated in demonstrations that involved some measure of personal risk.

PATRICK S. O’DONNELL

JUDT REPLIES

New York City

Patrick O’Donnell is quite right: Sartre’s flat was indeed attacked, probably by the OAS. But it seems to me disingenuous to compare Sartre’s or de Beauvoir’s participation in mass public demonstrations, surrounded by thousands of fellow-thinkers and volunteer bodyguards, with Said’s decadeslong isolation and exposure to vituperation, aggression and death threats. Sartre could indulge himself in any amount of “regrettable” or “wrong-headed” political misbehavior, secure in the knowledge that he had the protection of the very top levels of the French state. As de Gaulle put it, instructing his colleagues never to respond to Sartre’s provocations: “You don’t arrest Voltaire.” With that kind of assurance from on high, political courage comes cheap.

As for Sartre’s incitements to political murder, O’Donnell is probably correct to insist that they were consistent with his broader political ideas. But in that case the contrast with Said is even sharper than I suggested–and reflects little credit on the Frenchman.

TONY JUDT

AS BOLIVIA TURNS…

La Paz, Bolivia

As a Bolivian congressman, I was dismayed by Tom Hayden’s one-sided June 21 article, “Bolivia’s Indian Revolt.” His sources are prominent radical and violent leaders: Alvaro Garcia Linera, described as a “former guerrilla and political prisoner,” was jailed for such activities as blowing up buildings and power plants, organizing criminal actions, planning guerrilla warfare and exacerbating ethnic tensions. Felipe Quispe is also a convicted terrorist and an outspoken advocate of racist, violent and criminal actions. He has supported lynching and burning people alive, expressed admiration for Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman and asserted after 9/11, “We need actions like that to destroy the enemy. We salute in a fraternal and revolutionary way all who did this.”

This biased portrayal based on the accounts of radical and violent leaders ignores the views of most of Bolivia’s 8 million peaceful inhabitants. Since the restoration of democracy in 1982, Bolivia has made slow but steady economic and social progress, including for rural Indians. Former President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada was democratically elected in 1993 and 2002. Regrettably, in October 2003 his government was toppled through violent and undemocratic means by a mob-style movement in which Alvaro Garcia, Evo Morales and Felipe Quispe played a key role.

I do not wish to gloss over the many troubles my small, poor country faces; nor do I pretend the Sánchez de Lozada government was perfect. I believe it is the lack of US support instead of its alleged influence that not only contributed to the downfall of our democratically elected government but has put our country at the mercy of radical fundamentalists, financed by people like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and supported by Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Our future lies neither in succumbing to populists’ slick promises nor in surrendering to mob rule but in continuing to strengthen democracy and democratic institutions.

LUIS EDUARDO SILES PEREZNational Representative

Asheville, NC

Tom Hayden did not note that the natural gas at the center of Bolivia’s upheaval lies in the lowlands, not the Andes; that the president overthrown in October had overwhelming support in those lowlands (as did his suspended plans to export natural gas); that the cocalero leader Evo Morales and other more radicalized Andean leaders not only have minuscule support in the lowlands but are generally viewed with outright hostility there; and that the demographic and economic center of the nation is shifting eastward–again, toward the lowlands. The rebellions in the highland streets of La Paz and Cochabamba were viewed with dismay in the lowland streets of Santa Cruz de la Sierra (which by many estimates is now Bolivia’s largest city; it is certainly its wealthiest). The lowland population is far less “Indian” than in the highlands; at the same time, many lowland indigenous communities have chosen alliance with regional over highland movements. The truly volatile divide in Bolivia is between its Andean west and its tropical east. For his next visit, I hope Hayden makes it down from the mountains to learn about the other two-thirds of the country.

KATHLEEN LOWREY

Syracuse, NY

To portray the gas war and other protests as an “indigenous insurrection” is a gross simplification. These historically rooted conflicts involve ethnic and class struggles and are not simply “Indian uprisings.” Most of Bolivia’s people, including the vast majority of its urban poor and rural populations, are indeed Quechua, Aymara, Guaran’ or from other indigenous groups. But Bolivia’s ethnic politics are inextricably bound up with its class relations. The Quechua- and Aymara-speaking miners who marched on La Paz (led by Bolivia’s largest labor union) and played such a crucial role in forcing Sánchez de Lozada’s resignation did so as miners, not as Quechuas or Aymaras. In the Andean countryside Quechua- and Aymara-speakers rarely use “ind’gena” or “indio” as terms of self-identification (terms favored by urban intellectuals). The label of choice is campesino. The October protests were an indigenous uprising, certainly. But they were also, simultaneously and inseparably, class struggle.

TOM PERREAULT

Ithaca, NY

Tom Hayden does a good job of drawing on some of the most insightful observers, but he fails to mention that Bolivia’s problems are the maturation of neoliberal privatization policies promoted by the World Bank and the IMF for twenty years. The IMF, for example, has threatened to withhold concessionary funding if Bolivia does not export its gas under what many consider unfavorable conditions. He also ignores the role of the 1997 oil and gas privatization in the economic crisis that underlies the political meltdown. Hydrocarbon income contributed 50 percent of all government revenues through the 1990s, and the loss of these revenues (to companies including Enron) is a principal factor.

LINDA FARTHING and BEN KOHL

HAYDEN REPLIES

Los Angeles

It is certainly true, as Tom Perreault writes, that the uprisings have a class character. But there is a profound racial divide, with more than 60 percent of the people classified as indigenous–most of them poor and marginal. Both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times have remarked on the Indian character of these uprisings, as well as others since Chiapas in 1994.

The “lowlanders” mentioned by Kathleen Lowrey are indeed wealthier. Places like Santa Cruz are home to the white, privileged, business and middle classes most disturbed by the emergence of a militant indigenous majority claiming a voice in proportion to their numbers.

The draconian economic policies of the IMF, as Linda Farthing and Ben Kohl note, helped prompt the overthrow of President “Goni” and causes continuing political unrest. Unfortunately, top Democrats like James Carville and Stanley Greenberg also bear responsibility for being paid advisers for Goni’s politics of privatization during their missionary phase of NAFTA promotion.

As for the rant of Congressman Luis Eduardo Siles Perez, the tone of Bolivian politics makes internal Nation disputes seem positively Gandhian. It is true that Garcia Linera and Quispe are former guerrillas, as my article stated, which is nothing new in the history of Latin American politics. The question is when, if ever, the long-oppressed Indian majority in white-dominated Bolivia will achieve self-determination. The congressman glosses the fact that his indigenous colleague, Evo Morales, head of the coca growers’ union and the Movement Toward Socialism, may well come to power through the ballot box. Will the US government, with its “war” on drugs and neoliberal economic policies, stand by if the Indian majority unites behind Morales? Or will it move against what the congressman calls Morales’s “mob-style” politics?

TOM HAYDEN

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/letters-72/The Rootless Cosmopolitanhttps://www.thenation.com/article/rootless-cosmopolitan/Richard Goldstein,Our Readers,Tony Judt,Tony Judt,Tom Hayden,Our Readers,Tony Judt,Tony JudtJul 1, 2004From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map, which will be published in August by Pantheon.]]>

When Edward Said died in September 2003, after a decade-long battle against leukemia, he was probably the best-known intellectual in the world. Orientalism, his controversial account of the appropriation of the East in modern European thought and literature, has spawned an academic subdiscipline in its own right: A quarter of a century after its first publication, it continues to generate irritation, veneration and imitation. Even if its author had done nothing else, confining himself to teaching at Columbia University in New York–where he was employed from 1963 until his death–he would still have been one of the most influential scholars of the late twentieth century.

But he did not confine himself. From 1967, and with mounting urgency and passion as the years passed, Edward Said was also an eloquent, ubiquitous commentator on the crisis in the Middle East and an advocate for the cause of the Palestinians. This moral and political engagement was not really a displacement of Said’s intellectual attention–his critique of the West’s failure to understand Palestinian humiliation closely echoes, after all, his reading of nineteenth-century scholarship and fiction in Orientalism and subsequent books (notably Culture and Imperialism, published in 1993). But it transformed the professor of comparative literature at Columbia into a very public intellectual, adored or execrated with equal intensity by many millions of readers.

This was an ironic fate for a man who fitted almost none of the molds to which his admirers and enemies so confidently assigned him. Edward Said lived all his life at a tangent to the various causes with which he was associated. The involuntary “spokesman” for the overwhelmingly Muslim Arabs of Palestine was an Episcopalian Christian, born in 1935 to a Baptist from Nazareth. The uncompromising critic of imperial condescension was educated in some of the last of the colonial schools that had trained the indigenous elite of the European empires; for many years he was more at ease in English and French than in Arabic and an outstanding exemplar of a Western education with which he could never fully identify.

Edward Said was the idolized hero of a generation of cultural relativists in universities from Berkeley to Bombay, for whom “Orientalism” underwrote everything from career-building exercises in “postcolonial” obscurantism (“writing the other”) to denunciations of “Western Culture” in the academic curriculum. But Said himself had no time for such nonsense. Radical anti-foundationalism, the notion that everything is just a linguistic effect, struck him as shallow and “facile”: human rights, as he observed on more than one occasion, are not “cultural or grammatical things, and when they are violated…they are as real as anything we can encounter.”

As for the popular account of his thought that has Edward Said reading Western writers as mere byproducts of colonial privilege, he was quite explicit: “I do not believe that authors are mechanistically determined by ideology, class or economic history.” Indeed, when it came to the business of reading and writing, Said was an unabashedly traditional humanist, “despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern critics.” If there was anything that depressed him about younger literary scholars it was their overfamiliarity with “theory” at the expense of the art of close textual reading. Moreover, he enjoyed intellectual disagreement, seeing the toleration of dissent and even discord within the scholarly community as the necessary condition for the latter’s survival–my own expressed doubts about the core thesis of Orientalism were no impediment to our friendship. This was a stance that many of his admirers from afar, for whom academic freedom is at best a contingent value, were at a loss to comprehend.

This same deeply felt humanistic impulse put Said at odds with another occasional tic of engaged intellectuals, the enthusiastic endorsement of violence–usually at a safe distance and always at someone else’s expense. The “Professor of Terror,” as his enemies were wont to characterize Said, was in fact a consistent critic of political violence in all its forms. Unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, a comparably influential intellectual for the previous generation, Said had some firsthand experience of physical force–his university office was vandalized and sacked, and both he and his family received death threats. But whereas Sartre did not hesitate to advocate political murder as both efficacious and cleansing, Said never identified with terrorism, however much he sympathized with the motives and sentiments that drove it. The weak, he wrote, should use means that render their oppressors uncomfortable–something that indiscriminate murder of civilians can never achieve.

The reason for this was not that Edward Said was placid or a pacifist, much less someone lacking in strong commitments. Notwithstanding his professional success, his passion for music (he was an accomplished pianist and a close friend and sometime collaborator of Daniel Barenboim) and his gift for friendship, he was in certain ways a deeply angry man–as the essays in this book frequently suggest. But despite his identification with the Palestinian cause and his inexhaustible efforts to promote and explain it, Said quite lacked the sort of uninterrogated affiliation with a country or an idea that allows the activist or the ideologue to subsume any means to a single end.

Instead he was, as I suggested, always at a slight tangent to his affinities. In this age of displaced persons he was not even a typical exile, since most men and women forced to leave their country in our time have a place to which they can look back (or forward): a remembered–more often misremembered–homeland that anchors the transported individual or community in time if not in space. Palestinians don’t even have this. There never was a formally constituted Palestine. Palestinian identity thus lacks that conventional anterior reference.

In consequence, as Said tellingly observed just a few months before his death, “I still have not been able to understand what it means to love a country.” That, of course, is the characteristic condition of the rootless cosmopolitan. It is not very comfortable or safe to be without a country to love: It can bring down upon your head the anxious hostility of those for whom such rootlessness suggests a corrosive independence of spirit. But it is liberating: The world you look out upon may not be as reassuring as the vista enjoyed by patriots and nationalists, but you see further. As Said wrote in 1993, “I have no patience with the position that ‘we’ should only or mainly be concerned with what is ‘ours.'”

This is the authentic voice of the independent critic, speaking the truth to power…and supplying a dissenting voice in conflicts with authority: As Said wrote in the Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram in May 2001, “whether Israeli intellectuals have failed or not in their mission is not for us to decide. What concerns us is the shabby state of discourse and analysis in the Arab world.” It is also the voice of the free-standing “New York intellectual,” a species now fast approaching extinction–thanks in large measure to the same Middle Eastern conflict in which so many have opted to take up sides and identify with “us” and “ours.” (To its lasting credit, Columbia University withstood considerable internal and public pressure to censure or even remove Said because of his public interventions on the Palestinians’ behalf.) Edward Said, as the reader of these essays will discover, was by no means a conventional “spokesman” for one party in that conflict.

The Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung headed its obituary of Said Der Unbequeme–“The Uncomfortable Man.” But if anything, his lasting achievement was to make others uncomfortable. For the Palestinians Edward Said was an underappreciated and frequently irritating Cassandra, berating their leaders for incompetence–and worse. To his critics Said was a lightning rod, attracting fear and vituperation. Implausibly, this witty and cultivated man was cast as the very devil: the corporeal incarnation of every threat–real or imagined–to Israel and Jews alike. To an American Jewish community suffused with symbols of victimhood he was a provocatively articulate remembrancer of Israel’s very own victims. And by his mere presence here in New York, Edward Said was an ironic, cosmopolitan, Arab reminder of the parochialism of his critics.

The essays in this book cover the period December 2000 through March 2003. They thus take us from the end of the Oslo decade, the onset of the second intifada and the final breakdown of the “peace process,” through the Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the massacres of September 11, 2001, the American retaliation in Afghanistan and the long run-up to the US attack on Iraq–a distinctly turbulent and murderous twenty-eight months. During this time Said wrote copiously and urgently about the alarming state of affairs in the Middle East, contributing at least one article a month, often more, despite his worsening medical condition (to which there is no reference in these writings until August 2002, and then only a casual, passing allusion).

All but one of the pieces collected here were contributed to Al-Ahram. These writings are thus an opportunity for Said’s Western readers to see what he had to say to an Arab audience. What they show is that Said in his final years was consistently pursuing three themes: the urgent need to tell the world (above all, Americans) the truth about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians; the parallel urgency of getting Palestinians and other Arabs to recognize and accept the reality of Israel and engage with Israelis, especially the Israeli opposition; and the duty to speak openly about the failings of Arab leadership.

Indeed, Said was above all concerned with addressing and excoriating his fellow Arabs. It is the ruling Arab regimes, especially that of the Palestine Liberation Organization, that come in for the strongest criticism here: for their cupidity, their corruption, their malevolence and incredulity. This may seem almost unfair–it is, after all, the United States that has effective power, and Israel that was and is wreaking havoc among Said’s fellow Palestinians–but he seems to have felt it important to tell the truth to and about his own people, rather than risk indulging the “fawning elasticity with regard to one’s own side that has disfigured the history of intellectuals since time immemorial.”

In the course of these essays Said recounts checklists of Israeli abuses, a grim, depressing reminder of how Ariel Sharon’s government is squeezing the lifeblood from the quarantined Palestinian communities: Abuses against civilians that were once regarded as criminal acts even in wartime are now accepted behavior by a government ostensibly at peace. In Said’s account these abuses are not the accidental, unfortunate byproduct of the return to power of a belligerent, irredentist general, but rather the predictable–and, in Said’s case, predicted–consequence of the Palestinians’ engagement in the late, unlamented “peace process” itself.

For those of us who welcomed the Oslo process and watched hopefully as it developed over the course of the 1990s, Said’s disenchanted critique is depressing. But in retrospect it is difficult to deny that he got it right and we were wrong. As imagined by the Israeli peace party and welcomed by many others–Palestinians included–the Oslo process was supposed to build confidence and trust between the two sides. Contentious issues–the governance of Jerusalem, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, the problem of the Jewish settlements–would be dealt with “later,” in “final-status negotiations.” Meanwhile, the PLO would gain experience and credibility in the administration of autonomous Palestinian territory, and Israelis would live in peace. Eventually, two states–one Jewish, one Palestinian–would live in stable proximity, their security underwritten by the international community.

This was the premise behind the Declaration of Principles signed on the White House lawn in September 1993. But the whole thing was deeply flawed. As Said reminds us, there were not two “sides” to these negotiations. There was Israel, an established modern state with an awesome military apparatus (by some estimates the fourth-strongest in the world today), occupying land and people seized twenty-six years earlier in war. And there were the Palestinians, a dispersed, displaced, disinherited community with neither an army nor a territory of their own. There was an occupier and there were the occupied. In Said’s view, the only leverage that the Palestinians had was their annoying facticity: They were there, they wouldn’t go away and they wouldn’t let the Israelis forget what they had done to them.

Having nothing to give up, the Palestinians had nothing to negotiate. To “deal” with the occupier, after all, is to surrender–or collaborate. That is why Said described the 1993 declaration as “a Palestinian Versailles” and why he resigned in anticipation from the Palestine National Council. If the Israelis needed something from the Palestinians, Said reasoned, then the things the Palestinians wanted–full sovereignty, a return to the 1967 frontiers, the right of return, a share of Jerusalem–should be on the table at the outset, not at some undetermined final stage. And then there was the question of Israel’s “good faith.”

When the initial declaration was signed in 1993 there were just 32,750 Jewish housing units in settlements on the West Bank and Gaza. By October 2001 there were 53,121–a 62 percent increase, with more to come. From 1992 to 1996, under the Labor governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the settler population of the West Bank grew by 48 percent, that of Gaza by 61 percent. To put it no more strongly, this steady Israeli takeover of Palestinian land and resources hardly conformed to the spirit of Oslo. (Article 31 of the Oslo II agreement, signed in 1995, explicitly states that “neither side shall initiate or take any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.”)

Meanwhile, even as the PLO was authorized to administer the remaining Palestinian districts, Israel was constructing a network of “Jewish” roads crisscrossing those same regions and giving settlers and other Israelis exclusive access to far-flung housing units (and scarce aquifers) protected by permanent military installations. (This had the paradoxical consequence of segregating Jews and Arabs even as they became more economically interdependent: Israelis relying on cheap Palestinian labor, Palestinians dependent on Israel for jobs and access to markets.) The whole exercise was driven forward partly by an anachronistic Israeli conflation of land with security; partly by a post-’67 irredentist eschatology (with the Old Testament invoked as a sort of real estate contract with a partisan God); and partly by longstanding Zionist enthusiasm for territorial enlargement as an end in itself. From the Palestinian point of view the effect was to make the “Oslo process” an agonizing exercise in slow strangulation, with Gaza in particular transformed into a virtual prison under Palestinian warders, the Israeli army standing guard just outside the perimeter fence.

And then, in the year 2000, came the long-postponed “permanent status negotiations” themselves: first at Camp David and then, desperately, at Taba in the Sinai. Said, of course, had no time for the conventional American view that President Clinton and Prime Minister Ehud Barak virtually gave away the farm and that even then the ungrateful PLO and its leader, Yasir Arafat, refused the gift. This is not because Said had any sympathy for Arafat but because the original Camp David offer was–as Tanya Reinhart described it in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot on July 8, 2001–so palpably a fraud. The Palestinians were to get 50 percent of their own land, chopped into separate and often non-contiguous cantons; Israel was to annex 10 percent of the land; and the remaining 40 percent was to be left “undecided”–but under indefinite Israeli rule.

Six months later, at Taba, the Palestinians were offered an improved territorial deal, certainly the best they could ever have hoped for from an Israeli government. But the resulting Palestinian state would still have been utterly dependent on Israel and vulnerable to its whims; the grievances of Palestinian refugees were never fully addressed; and the contentious issues of sovereignty over Jerusalem remained unresolved. Indeed, even the last-minute Israeli concessions were still encumbered with what Said nicely terms “conditions and qualifications and entailments (like one of the endlessly deferred and physically unobtainable estates in a Jane Austen novel).”

Meanwhile Barak had continued to expand the population of the very settlements that his own negotiators recognized as a major impediment to agreement. Even if the PLO leaders had wanted to sell the Taba discussions to their constituents, they might have had difficulty doing so. The second intifada, which burst out following Sharon’s meticulously timed visit to the Temple Mount, has been a disaster for the Palestinians, but it was born out of years–the Oslo years–of frustration and humiliation.

Taba, and especially Camp David, were the bitter fruits of Oslo, and in Edward Said’s view the PLO’s error in engaging the process in the first place was well illustrated by its inevitable rejection of the outcome, retroactively discrediting the whole strategy of negotiations. In an Al–Ahram article of June 2002, Said is scathingly unforgiving of the PLO apparatchiks and their leader, who for a while did rather well out of the power they exercised as the “Vichyite” governors of occupied Palestine under Israel’s benign oversight. They were and are “a byword for brutality, autocracy and unimaginable corruption.”

In other contributions to the same newspaper, Said writes that Arafat and his circle “have made our general situation worse, much worse.” “Palestinians (and, by extension, the other Arabs) have been traduced and hopelessly misled by their leaders,” who have neither high principles nor practical, pragmatic strategies. “It has been years since Arafat represented his people, their sufferings and cause, and like his other Arab counterparts, he hangs on like a much-too-ripe fruit without real purpose or position.”

What, then, is to be done? If the Palestinian leadership is corrupt and incompetent; if Israeli governments won’t even keep faith with their own stated commitments, much less the desires of their interlocutors; if there is so much fear and loathing on all sides, how should the two-state solution be implemented, now that Israelis, Palestinians and the international community–even the Americans–all at last accept it in principle? Here, once again, Said was at odds with almost everyone.

In 1980, when he first publicly pressed for a two-state solution, Said was attacked and abused from all sides, not least by Arafat’s own Fatah movement. Then, in 1988, the Palestine National Council belatedly conceded that the best possible outcome was indeed the division of Palestine into two states–one Israeli, one Palestinian–echoing Said’s insistence that there was no alternative to reciprocal territorial self-determination for Jews and Arabs alike. But as the years went by, with half of the occupied territories expropriated; with the Palestinian community a shambles and the putative Palestinian territory a blighted landscape of isolated enclaves, flattened olive groves and ruined houses, where humiliated adults were fast losing the initiative to angry, alienated adolescents, Said drew the increasingly irresistible conclusion.

Israel was never going to quit the West Bank, at least not in any way that would leave it in a coherent, governable condition. What kind of a state could the West Bank and Gaza ever constitute? Who but a criminal mafia would ever want to take on the task of “governing” it? The “Palestine” of PLO imaginings was a fantasy–and a rather unappealing one at that. For good or ill, there was only going to be one real state in the lands of historic Palestine: Israel. This was not utopia; it was merely hard-headed pragmatism shorn of illusion. The genuinely realistic approach lay in accepting this fact and thinking seriously about how to make the best of it: “Much more important than having a state is the kind of state it is.” For the last decade of his life Edward Said was an unbending advocate of a single, secular state for Israelis and Palestinians.

What grounds did Edward Said have for his faith in a single-state solution, a nonexclusive, secular, democratic alternative to the present impasse? In the first place, the status quo is awful and getting worse: two peoples, each sustained by its exclusive victim narrative, competing indefinitely across the dead bodies of their children for the same tiny piece of land. One of them is an armed state, the other a stateless people, but otherwise they are depressingly similar: What, after all, is the Palestinian national story if not a reproachful mirror to Zionism, a tale of expulsion, diaspora, resurrection and return? There is no way to divide the disputed “homeland” to mutual satisfaction and benefit. Little good can come of two such statelets, mutually resentful, each with an influential domestic constituency committed to the destruction and absorption of its neighbor.

In the second place, something fundamental has changed in the Palestinian condition. For four decades millions of Palestinian Arabs–in Israel, in the occupied territories, in refugee camps across the Arab world and in exile everywhere–had been all but invisible. Their very existence was long denied by Israeli politicians; their memory of expulsion had been removed from the official record and passed unmentioned in history books; the record of their homes, their villages and their land was expunged from the very soil itself. That, as Said noted, was why he kept on telling the same story: “There seems to be nothing in the world which sustains the story; unless you go on telling it, it will just drop and disappear.” And yet “it is very hard to espouse for five decades, a continually losing cause.” It was as though Palestinians had no existence except when someone committed a terrorist atrocity–at which point that is all they were, their provenance uncertain, their violence inexplicable.

That is why the “right of return” had so central a place in all Palestinian demands–not because any serious person supposed that Israel could take “back” millions of refugees and their descendants, but from the deeply felt need for acknowledgment: a recognition that the initial expulsion took place, that a primordial wrong was committed. That is what so annoyed Said about Oslo: It seemed to excuse or forgive the Israelis for the occupation and everything else. But, as he wrote in Al-Ahram in March 2002, “Israel cannot be excused and allowed to walk away from the table with not even a rhetorical demand [my emphasis] that it needs to atone for what it did.” Attention must be paid.

But attention, of course, is now being paid. An overwhelming majority of world opinion outside the United States sees the Palestinian tragedy today much as the Palestinians themselves see it. They are the natives of Israel, an indigenous community excluded from nationhood in its own homeland: dispossessed and expelled, illegally expropriated, confined to “bantustans,” denied many fundamental rights and exposed on a daily basis to injustice and violence. Today there is no longer the slightest pretense by well-informed Israelis that the Arabs left in 1948 of their own free will or at the behest of foreign despots, as we were once taught. Benny Morris, one of the leading Israeli scholars on the subject, recently reminded readers of the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz that Israeli soldiers did not merely expel Palestinians in 1948-49, in an early, incomplete attempt at ethnic cleansing; they committed war crimes along the way, including the rape and murder of women and children.

Of course, Morris notoriously sees nothing wrong in this record–he treats it as the collateral damage that accompanies state-building. (“I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes,” he told Ha’aretz. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”) But this brings us to the third ground for thinking Said may be right about the chances for a single state. Just as the Palestinian cause has begun to find favor in public opinion, and is gaining the moral upper hand, so Israel’s international standing has precipitately collapsed. For many years the insuperable problem for Palestinians was that they were being expelled, colonized, occupied and generally mistreated not by French colons or Dutch Afrikaners but, in Said’s words, by the Jewish citizens of Israel, “remnants of the Nazi Holocaust with a tragic history of genocide and persecution.”

The victim of victims is in an impossible situation–not made any better, as Said pointed out, by the Arab propensity to squeeze out from under the shadow of the Holocaust by minimizing or even denying it. But when it comes to mistreating others, even victims don’t get a free pass forever. The charge that Poles often persecuted Jews before, during and after World War II can no longer be satisfactorily deflected by invoking Hitler’s 3 million Polish victims. Mutatis mutandis, the same now applies to Israel. Until the military victory of 1967, and even for some years afterward, the dominant international image of Israel was the one presented by its left Zionist founders and their many admirers in Europe and elsewhere: a courageous little country surrounded by enemies, where the desert had been made to bloom and the indigenous population airbrushed from the picture.

Following the invasion of Lebanon, and with gathering intensity since the first intifada of the late 1980s, the public impression of Israel has steadily darkened. Today it presents a ghastly image: a place where sneering 18-year-olds with M-16s taunt helpless old men (“security measures”); where bulldozers regularly flatten whole apartment blocks (“rooting out terrorists”); where helicopters fire rockets into residential streets (“targeted killings”); where subsidized settlers frolic in grass-fringed swimming pools, oblivious of Arab children a few meters away who fester and rot in the worst slums on the planet; and where retired generals and Cabinet ministers speak openly of bottling up the Palestinians “like drugged roaches in a bottle” (former Israeli Chief of Staff Rafael Eytan) and cleansing the land of its Arab cancer (former Housing Minister Effi Eitam).

Israel is utterly dependent on the United States for money, arms and diplomatic support. One or two states share common enemies with Israel; a handful of countries buy its weapons; a few others are its de facto accomplices in ignoring international treaties and secretly manufacturing nuclear weapons. But outside Washington, Israel has no friends–at the United Nations it cannot even count on the support of America’s staunchest allies. Despite the political and diplomatic incompetence of the PLO (well documented in Said’s writings); despite the manifest shortcomings of the Arab world at large (“lingering outside the main march of humanity”); despite Israel’s own sophisticated efforts to publicize its case, the Jewish state today is widely regarded as a–the–leading threat to world peace. After thirty-seven years of military occupation, Israel has gained nothing in security. It has lost everything in domestic civility and international respectability, and it has forfeited the moral high ground forever.

The newfound acknowledgment of the Palestinians’ claims and the steady discrediting of the Zionist project (not least among many profoundly troubled Israelis) might seem to make it harder rather than easier to envisage Jews and Arabs living harmoniously in a single state. And just as a minority of Palestinians may always resent their Jewish neighbors, there is a risk that some Israelis will never, as it were, forgive the Palestinians for what the Israelis have done to them. But as Said understood, the Palestinians’ aggrieved sense of neglect and the Israelis’ insistence on the moral rectitude of their case were twin impediments to a resolution of their common dilemma. Neither side could “see” the other. As Orwell observed in his “Notes on Nationalism,” “If one harbours anywhere in one’s mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible.”

Today, in spite of everything, there is actually a better appreciation by some people on both sides of where–quite literally–the other is coming from. This, I think, arises from a growing awareness that Jews and Arabs occupy the same space and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Their fates are hopelessly entangled. Fence or no fence, the territory now ruled by Israel can only be “cleansed” of its Arab (or its Jewish) residents by an act of force that the international community could not countenance. As Said notes, “historic Palestine” is now a lost cause–but so, for the same reasons, is “historic Israel.” Somehow or other, a single institutional entity capable of accommodating and respecting both communities will have to emerge, though when and in what form is still obscure.

The real impediment to new thinking in the Middle East, in Edward Said’s view, was not Arafat, or Sharon, or even the suicide bombers or the ultras of the settlements. It was the United States. The one place where official Israeli propaganda has succeeded beyond measure, and where Palestinian propaganda has utterly failed, is in America. As Said observed in a May 2002 column for Al-Ahram, American Jews (rather like Arab politicians) live in “extraordinary self-isolation in fantasy and myth.” Many Israelis are terribly aware of what occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has done to their own society (if somewhat less sensitive to its effect on others). In the words of Haim Guri, an Israeli poet who served in the 1948 war, “Rule over another nation corrupts and distorts Israel’s qualities, tears the nation apart, and shatters society.” But most Americans, including virtually every American politician, have no sense of any of this.

That is why Said insists in these essays upon the need for Palestinians to bring their case to the American public rather than just, as he puts it, imploring the American President to “give” them a state. American public opinion matters, and Said despaired of the uninformed anti-Americanism of Arab intellectuals and students: “It is not acceptable to sit in Beirut or Cairo meeting halls and denounce American imperialism (or Zionist colonialism for that matter) without a whit of understanding that these are complex societies not always truly represented by their governments’ stupid or cruel policies.” But as an American he was frustrated above all at his own country’s political myopia: Only America can break the murderous deadlock in the Middle East, but “what the U.S. refuses to see clearly it can hardly hope to remedy.”

Whether the United States will awaken to its responsibilities and opportunities remains unclear. It will certainly not do so unless we engage a debate about Israel and the Palestinians that many people would prefer to avoid, even at the cost of isolating America–with Israel–from the rest of the world. In order to be effective, this debate has to happen in America itself, and it must be conducted by Americans. That is why Edward Said was so singularly important. Over three decades, virtually single-handedly, he wedged open a conversation in America about Israel, Palestine and the Palestinians. In so doing he performed an inestimable public service at considerable personal risk. His death opens a yawning void in American public life. He is irreplaceable.